VOICES OF STRENGTH

Lyndon B. Johnson

…let me say this: Of those to whom much is given, much is asked. I cannot say — and no man could say — that no more will be asked of us. Yet I believe that now, no less than when the decade began, this “generation of Americans” is willing to “pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, to assure the survival, and the success, of liberty.”

Since those words were spoken by John F. Kennedy, the people of America have kept that compact with mankind’s noblest cause. And we shall continue to keep it.

Yet, I believe that we must always be mindful of this one thing — whatever the trials and the tests ahead, the ultimate strength of our country and our cause will lie, not in powerful weapons or infinite resources or boundless wealth, but will lie in the unity of our people.

-Lyndon B. Johnson On Not Seeking Reelection 1968

…liberty and the pursuit of happiness. We have learnt a great deal of both in the past century. We know that individual liberty and individual happiness mean nothing unless both are ordered in the sense that one man’s meat is not another man’s poison. We know that the old “rights of personal competency” — the right to read, to think, to speak to choose and live a mode of life, must be respected at all hazards. We know that liberty to do anything which deprives others of those elemental rights is outside the protection of any compact; and that government in this regard is the maintenance of a balance, within which every individual may have a place if he will take it; in which every individual may find safety if he wishes it; in which every individual may attain such power as his ability permits, consistent with his assuming the accompanying responsibility.

Faith in America, faith in our tradition of personal responsibility, faith in our institutions, faith in ourselves…
-Franklin D. Roosevelt Commonwealth Club Address 1932

Franklin D. Roosevelt

Woodrow Wilson First Inaugural Address 1913

We see that in many things that life is very great. It is incomparably great in its material aspects, in its body of wealth, in the diversity and sweep of its energy, in the industries which have been conceived and built up by the genius of individual men and the limitless enterprise of groups of men. It is great, also, very great, in its moral force. Nowhere else in the world have noble men and women exhibited in more striking forms the beauty and the energy of sympathy and helpfulness and counsel in their efforts to rectify wrong, alleviate suffering, and set the weak in the way of strength and hope. We have built up, moreover, a great system of government, which has stood through a long age as in many respects a model for those who seek to set liberty upon foundations that will endure against fortuitous change, against storm and accident. Our life contains every great thing, and contains it in rich abundance.

But the evil has come with the good, and much fine gold has been corroded. With riches has come inexcusable waste. We have squandered a great part of what we might have used, and have not stopped to conserve the exceeding bounty of nature, without which our genius for enterprise would have been worthless and impotent, scorning to be careful, shamefully prodigal as well as admirably efficient. We have been proud of our industrial achievements, but we have not hitherto stopped thoughtfully enough to count the human cost, the cost of lives snuffed out, of energies overtaxed and broken, the fearful physical and spiritual cost to the men and women and children upon whom the dead weight and burden of it all has fallen pitilessly the years through. The groans and agony of it all had not yet reached our ears, the solemn, moving undertone of our life, coming up out of the mines and factories, and out of every home where the struggle had its intimate and familiar seat. With the great Government went many deep secret things which we too long delayed to look into and scrutinize with candid, fearless eyes. The great Government we loved has too often been made use of for private and selfish purposes, and those who used it had forgotten the people.

The Nation has been deeply stirred, stirred by a solemn passion, stirred by the knowledge of wrong, of ideals lost, of government too often debauched and made an instrument of evil. The feelings with which we face this new age of right and opportunity sweep across our heartstrings like some air out of God’s own presence, where justice and mercy are reconciled and the judge and the brother are one. We know our task to be no mere task of politics but a task which shall search us through and through, whether we be able to understand our time and the need of our people, whether we be indeed their spokesmen and interpreters, whether we have the pure heart to comprehend and the rectified will to choose our high course of action.

What about success?

Success is somebody else’s failure. Success is the American Dream we can keep dreaming because most people in most places, including thirty million of ourselves, live wide awake in the terrible reality of poverty. No, I do not wish you success. I don’t even want to talk about it. I want to talk about failure.

Because you are human beings you are going to meet failure. You are going to meet disappointment, injustice, betrayal, and irreparable loss. You will find you’re weak where you thought yourself strong. You’ll work for possessions and then find they possess you. You will find yourself — as I know you already have — in dark places, alone, and afraid.

What I hope for you, for all my sisters and daughters, brothers and sons, is that you will be able to live there, in the dark place. To live in the place that our rationalizing culture of success denies, calling it a place of exile, uninhabitable, foreign.

-Ursula K. Le Guin – Mills College Commencement Address 1983

Jimmy Carter A Crisis of Confidence 1979

The confidence that we have always had as a people is not simply some romantic dream or a proverb in a dusty book that we read just on the Fourth of July. It is the idea which founded our nation and has guided our development as a people. Confidence in the future has supported everything else — public institutions and private enterprise, our own families, and the very Constitution of the United States. Confidence has defined our course and has served as a link between generations. We’ve always believed in something called progress. We’ve always had a faith that the days of our children would be better than our own.

As a people we know our past and we are proud of it. Our progress has been part of the living history of America, even the world. We always believed that we were part of a great movement of humanity itself called democracy, involved in the search for freedom; and that belief has always strengthened us in our purpose.

In a nation that was proud of hard work, strong families, close-knit communities, and our faith in God, too many of us now tend to worship self-indulgence and consumption. Human identity is no longer defined by what one does, but by what one owns. But we’ve discovered that owning things and consuming things does not satisfy our longing for meaning. We’ve learned that piling up material goods cannot fill the emptiness of lives which have no confidence or purpose. The symptoms of this crisis of the American spirit are all around us.

As you know, there is a growing disrespect for government and for churches and for schools, the news media, and other institutions. This is not a message of happiness or reassurance, but it is the truth and it is a warning.

We are at a turning point in our history. There are two paths to choose. One is a path I’ve warned about tonight, the path that leads to fragmentation and self-interest. Down that road lies a mistaken idea of freedom, the right to grasp for ourselves some advantage over others. That path would be one of constant conflict between narrow interests ending in chaos and immobility. It is a certain route to failure.

All the traditions of our past, all the lessons of our heritage, all the promises of our future point to another path — the path of common purpose and the restoration of American values. That path leads to true freedom for our nation and ourselves.

There is good in the world and it is worth fighting for.

What does it take to get people to care about a disaster that they haven’t experienced directly?  Our apparent inability to see and feel the human toll behind mass-casualty statistics suggests that we are hardwired for indifference.

It is imperative to humanize mass casualties, whether the more than 800,000 murdered in Rwanda’s 1994 genocide, the over two million Vietnamese civilians killed in the Vietnam War, the 3,000 slain by al Qaeda on 9/11 or the 155,000-plus American dead in the Covid-19 crisis.  Such storytelling remains crucial in bringing the powerful to account-and giving voices to those who can never speak again.

-Lesley M.M. Blume Author of “Fallout”

Excusing insubordination and aggression in the name of racial equity is not a civil rights accomplishment. The third-party victims of such behavior are themselves disproportionately minority…

But the alleged beneficiary of a racial double standard in conduct is also a victim. Schools are usually the last chance to civilize children if their family has failed to do so.  They accomplish that civilizing mission through the application of a color-blind behavioral code, neutrally enforced, that communicates to students that their behavioral choices have consequences. A student who perceives that his race is an excuse for bad conduct will be handicapped for life. Pace the race advocates, it is this disparate-impact-induced state of affairs-not the supposed implicit racism of teachers and principals-that constitutes an actual school-to-prison pipeline.

-Heather MacDonald ‘Back to Discipline” 2018

Goodness is the deepest truth about the human story.

Therefore, the enlargement of liberty for individual human beings must be the supreme goal and the abiding practice of any Western society.

The first element of this individual liberty is the freedom of speech: the right to express and communicate ideas, to set oneself apart from the dumb beasts of field and forest; the right to recall governments to their duties and to their  obligations; above all, the right to affirm one’s membership and allegiance to the body politic — to society — to the men with whom we share our land, our heritage, and our children’s future.

Hand in hand with freedom of speech goes the power to be heard, to share in the decisions of government which shape men’s lives. Everything that makes man’s life worthwhile — family, work, education, a place to rear one’s children and a place to rest one’s head — all this depends on the decisions of government; all can be swept away by a government which does not heed the demands of its people, and I mean all of its people. Therefore, the essential humanity of man can be protected and preserved only where government must answer — not just to the wealthy, not just to those of a particular religion, not just to those of a particular race, but to all of the people.

-Robert F. Kennedy Address at Cape Town University 1966

Only when free utterance is suppressed is it needed, and when it is needed, it is most vital to justice.

Peace is good. But if you are interested in peace through force and without free discussion—that is to say, free utterance decently and in order—your interest in justice is slight. And peace without justice is tyranny, no matter how you may sugarcoat it with expedience. This state today is in more danger from suppression than from violence, because, in the end, suppression leads to violence. Violence, indeed, is the child of suppression. Whoever pleads for justice helps to keep the peace; and whoever tramples on the plea for justice temperately made in the name of peace only outrages peace and kills something fine in the heart of man which God put there when we got our manhood. When that is killed, brute meets brute on each side of the line.

So, dear friend, put fear out of your heart. This nation will survive, this state will prosper, the orderly business of life will go forward if only men can speak in whatever way given them to utter what their hearts hold—by voice, by posted card, by letter, or by press. Reason has never failed men. Only force and repression have made the wrecks in the world.

William Allen White’s 1922 editorial “To an Anxious Friend”, as noted by the August 5, 2020 Wall Street Journal’s Notable & Quotable.

In 19th-century Britain, Victorians spoke the language of morality because they believed in the reality of virtues—virtues as the guiding principles of public as well as private affairs. In this sense there was a basic consensus on social affairs. Liberals and conservatives, radicals and socialists, disagreed about specific policies, but they were agreed on the principle that any measure of relief, for example (or charity, for that matter), had to justify itself by showing that it would promote the moral as well as the material well-being of the recipients—their “character,” as the Victorians said. And the character not only of those receiving relief but also of those not receiving relief, the independent laboring poor, as well. . . .

The divorce of social policy from moral principles—the de-moralization of social policy—also reflects the spirit of relativism that is so pervasive in our time. It is this that makes it difficult to pass any moral judgments or impose any moral conditions upon the recipients of relief.

“Beyond Social Policy: Re-moralizing America” by Gertrude Himmelfarb, The Wall Street Journal, Feb. 7, 1995

iPresident of the United States…an alternative reality platform powered by voices where humanity intersects with technology to drive positive change.

Over 50 years ago, a biologist first warned of the perils of overpopulation resulting in mass starvation. His view now?

It’s much darker today.  And you can prove it. In other words, there’s no — after all, we were worried then about the problems of feeding human society when there was 3 1/2 billion people on the planet.  Since then, something on the order of 200 to 500 million people have starve to death or died of nutrition related illness. Now we’ve got way over 7 billion people. We have something on the order of 800 million that’s more than double the population of United States, hungry and starving and another billion or two who are micronutrient malnourished. And people will say well, we don’t have any food problem.  Well, the people saying that, of course, usually don’t. I don’t have a food problem. I wish I had a little bit more of a food problem. But if you’ve ever traveled in poor countries, you can’t miss the undernourished kids. And the fact that people are micronutrient malnourished means they can’t function well in society. So when we try and get society to take action on our existential problems we have trouble doing it.

Paul Ehrlich as recorded at Climate One on Stanford University

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A researcher and biologist discussed societal upheaval. 

And the problem of overconsumption of course is the other side of the coin.  Other words the big problem for our life support systems is the aggregate consumption. The stuff that we extract from nature to use and that’s clearly the product of the number of people and the average per capita consumption.  Saying it’s only consumption is like saying well the area of a rectangle is only the width. It turns out when you multiply two things together they both are equally important. And in this case population and per capita consumption are what really important.  And one of the huge things is people, many people like us consume too much and then there is several billion who don’t get to consume enough and that’s one of the huge problems that’s not normally discussed in those terms.

Paul Ehrlich as recorded at Climate One on Stanford University

 For over 50 years, a renowned professor warned of environmental deterioration.

People say oh well we can do it. We can distribute food better.  We can stop wasting food. Well, I hate to tell you, you’re a young man, but in the 1950s and 60s we were saying, you know, we could feed a lot more people if we didn’t waste so much food.  We’re wasting more now than we did then.

In other words, when you look at the trends in how we’re behaving, we’re wrapping more — after all, in 1960 we didn’t have Texas size chunks of plastic debris floating around in the oceans.  With now within the next few years we’ll have more plastic in the oceans than we have weight of fish, weight of plastic. The plastic gets ground into tiny little fragments on the surface they’re collected persistent organic pollutants, POPs, and they are now small enough, those fragments, to go through the blood brain barrier.  Our seafood is loaded with them. We are one of the things that’s not recognize at all is the toxification of our entire planet.

Paul Ehrlich as recorded at Climate One on Stanford University

A researcher and biologist discussed societal upheaval. 

And the problem of overconsumption of course is the other side of the coin.  Other words the big problem for our life support systems is the aggregate consumption. The stuff that we extract from nature to use and that’s clearly the product of the number of people and the average per capita consumption.  Saying it’s only consumption is like saying well the area of a rectangle is only the width. It turns out when you multiply two things together they both are equally important. And in this case population and per capita consumption are what really important.  And one of the huge things is people, many people like us consume too much and then there is several billion who don’t get to consume enough and that’s one of the huge problems that’s not normally discussed in those terms.

Paul Ehrlich as recorded at Climate One on Stanford University

 

 For over 50 years, a renowned professor warned of environmental deterioration.

People say oh well we can do it. We can distribute food better.  We can stop wasting food. Well, I hate to tell you, you’re a young man, but in the 1950s and 60s we were saying, you know, we could feed a lot more people if we didn’t waste so much food.  We’re wasting more now than we did then.

In other words, when you look at the trends in how we’re behaving, we’re wrapping more — after all, in 1960 we didn’t have Texas size chunks of plastic debris floating around in the oceans.  With now within the next few years we’ll have more plastic in the oceans than we have weight of fish, weight of plastic. The plastic gets ground into tiny little fragments on the surface they’re collected persistent organic pollutants, POPs, and they are now small enough, those fragments, to go through the blood brain barrier.  Our seafood is loaded with them. We are one of the things that’s not recognize at all is the toxification of our entire planet.

Paul Ehrlich as recorded at Climate One on Stanford University

 Known as the prophet of doom, a professor of population studies at Stanford University said:

…the history of life has not been uniform.  There have been five times when over 75% of the kinds of animals and plants the species have disappeared.  We know the cause of the last one 66 million years ago was almost certainly a collision with an asteroid on the Yucatán Peninsula, which wiped out the dinosaurs, except for the birds.  So why should anybody care? Well, we’re in the middle or at the very start, but maybe almost in the middle of the sixth great extinction episode caused entirely by human activities. Why should you care about the disappearance of little insect?  Well, let me give you an example. Most of the focus has been on loss of species which from the point of view of a human lifespan is going on very slowly; we lose a few each year. Let’s suppose — but what we’re losing in huge numbers is the populations of species.  Let’s suppose that you wiped out a little single bee species in North America called Apis Mellifera which is the honeybee. Now if you wiped them out entirely in North America, there would be no loss of biodiversity by the species count standard, but we lose somewhere between $15 and $20 billion worth of agricultural production and our diet will become much less nutritious.  The point is, all those other organisms are working parts of our life support system and when you just have a few of them left that doesn’t count in the extinction, the number of species extinction counters, but it counts a great deal in our very lives. And what we’re doing from the sea and from the land is wiping out population after population members of our life support systems.  What we’re busily doing is sawing off the limb that we’re sitting on.

Paul Ehrlich as recorded at Climate One on Stanford University

 A scientist with a statements about limited resources and their impact on humanity stated:

Most of the scientists I know think civilization is teetering on the brink of a global disaster.  They just don’t know when it’s going to hit.  I don’t have the answer to that either.  I’m scared as hell. 

Here’s the scientific community saying, fundamentally, “If we don’t change our ways, we’re screwed.”  And they got no attention at all.  Even though the Union of Concerned Scientists put out this statement which was signed by more than half of all the Nobel laureates in science and another 1,500 distinguished scientists. 

We’ve all got to get together and demand something better out of our government and out of each other.  We’ve got a system that’s making us working harder, and isn’t giving us satisfaction.  We’ve got to sit down and decide what the hell we really want to be as human beings.

Paul R Ehrlich Statements

 Known as the prophet of doom, a professor of population studies at Stanford University said:

…the history of life has not been uniform.  There have been five times when over 75% of the kinds of animals and plants the species have disappeared.  We know the cause of the last one 66 million years ago was almost certainly a collision with an asteroid on the Yucatán Peninsula, which wiped out the dinosaurs, except for the birds.  So why should anybody care? Well, we’re in the middle or at the very start, but maybe almost in the middle of the sixth great extinction episode caused entirely by human activities. Why should you care about the disappearance of little insect?  Well, let me give you an example. Most of the focus has been on loss of species which from the point of view of a human lifespan is going on very slowly; we lose a few each year. Let’s suppose — but what we’re losing in huge numbers is the populations of species.  Let’s suppose that you wiped out a little single bee species in North America called Apis Mellifera which is the honeybee. Now if you wiped them out entirely in North America, there would be no loss of biodiversity by the species count standard, but we lose somewhere between $15 and $20 billion worth of agricultural production and our diet will become much less nutritious.  The point is, all those other organisms are working parts of our life support system and when you just have a few of them left that doesn’t count in the extinction, the number of species extinction counters, but it counts a great deal in our very lives. And what we’re doing from the sea and from the land is wiping out population after population members of our life support systems.  What we’re busily doing is sawing off the limb that we’re sitting on.

Paul Ehrlich as recorded at Climate One on Stanford University

 A scientist with a statements about limited resources and their impact on humanity stated:

Most of the scientists I know think civilization is teetering on the brink of a global disaster.  They just don’t know when it’s going to hit.  I don’t have the answer to that either.  I’m scared as hell. 

Here’s the scientific community saying, fundamentally, “If we don’t change our ways, we’re screwed.”  And they got no attention at all.  Even though the Union of Concerned Scientists put out this statement which was signed by more than half of all the Nobel laureates in science and another 1,500 distinguished scientists. 

We’ve all got to get together and demand something better out of our government and out of each other.  We’ve got a system that’s making us working harder, and isn’t giving us satisfaction.  We’ve got to sit down and decide what the hell we really want to be as human beings.

Paul R Ehrlich Statements

Exploring real issues – real people. Study the past to see the future. Let’s think– connect- change.

Society has used the ocean as a convenient place to dispose of unwanted materials and waste products for many centuries, either directly or indirectly via rivers. The volume of material increased with a growing population and an increasingly industrialized society. The demand for manufactured goods and packaging, to contain or protect food and goods, increased throughout the twentieth century. Large-scale production of plastics began in the 1950s and plastics have become widespread, used in a bewildering variety of applications. The many favourable properties of plastics, including durability and low cost, make plastics the obvious choice in many situations. Unfortunately, society has been slow to anticipate the need for dealing adequately with end-of-life plastics, to prevent plastics entering the marine environment. As a result there has been a substantial volume of debris added to the ocean over the past 60 years, covering a very wide range of sizes (metres to nanometres in diameter). This is a phenomenon that has occurred wherever humans live or travel. As a result there are multiple routes of entry of plastics into the ocean, and ocean currents have transported plastics to the most remote regions. It is truly a global problem.

GESAMP Sources, Fate and Effects of Microplastics in the Marine Environment: A Global Assessment

Society has used the ocean as a convenient place to dispose of unwanted materials and waste products for many centuries, either directly or indirectly via rivers. The volume of material increased with a growing population and an increasingly industrialized society. The demand for manufactured goods and packaging, to contain or protect food and goods, increased throughout the twentieth century. Large-scale production of plastics began in the 1950s and plastics have become widespread, used in a bewildering variety of applications. The many favourable properties of plastics, including durability and low cost, make plastics the obvious choice in many situations.

Unfortunately, society has been slow to anticipate the need for dealing adequately with end-of-life plastics, to prevent plastics entering the marine environment. As a result there has been a substantial volume of debris added to the ocean over the past 60 years, covering a very wide range of sizes (metres to nanometres in diameter). This is a phenomenon that has occurred wherever humans live or travel. As a result there are multiple routes of entry of plastics into the ocean, and ocean currents have transported plastics to the most remote regions. It is truly a global problem.

GESAMP Sources, Fate and Effects of Microplastics in the Marine Environment: A Global Assessment

An American social philosopher summarized 40 years ago that:

It has often been said that power corrupts. But it is perhaps equally important to realize that weakness, too, corrupts. Power corrupts the few, while weakness corrupts the many. Hatred, malice, rudeness, intolerance, and suspicion are the faults of weakness. The resentment of the weak does not spring from any injustice done to them but from the sense of inadequacy and impotence. They hate not wickedness but weakness. When it is their power to do so, the weak destroy weakness wherever they see it.

Passionate hatred can give meaning and purpose to an empty life. Thus people haunted by the purposelessness of their lives try to find a new content not only by dedicating themselves to a holy cause but also by nursing a fanatical grievance. A mass movement offers them unlimited opportunities for both.

In the corporateness of a mass movement, we find a new freedom — freedom to hate, bully, lie, torture, murder and betray without shame and remorse. Herein undoubtedly lies part of the attractiveness of a mass movement.

Eric Hoffer, Reflections on the Human Condition & Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements

Psychologists who wrote of those with narcissistic personality disorders, especially found among politicians, stated:

Besides showing lack of empathy (as judged not by words but by actions), narcissists filter information and react on the basis of the effect on their egos. Their actions reflect grandiose beliefs of superiority and uniqueness as well as their need for admiration and worship.

Narcissists are arrogant and preoccupied with fantasies of unlimited self-importance, success, and power (including that they alone can do something) and exaggerate their accomplishments and popularity. They exploit or take advantage of people for personal gain including feeding their egos and thus require excessive admiration. They pit people against each other to get what they want—they divide people to conquer and gain power over them. They manipulate others by influencing emotions like fear and anger, and with threats and lies. Another manipulation technique used is redefining reality by repeatedly fabricating fiction and arguing about it as if it were fact (such as presenting alternative facts), which leads listeners to question their own understanding of reality.

Narcissists make others miserable and get aggressive with people who won’t give them the agreement, admiration, and respect they feel entitled to, expecting automatic compliance. These traits are often found in dictators.

A narcissist is toxic to situations and people, except perhaps to an inner circle of supporters—at least for as long as they continue to support the narcissist’s agenda.

Article “Childhood Roots of Narcissistic Personality Disorder by Dr’s Brian D. Johnson and Laurie Berdahl, 2017.

“What is progress? You might think that the question is so subjective and culturally relative as to be forever unanswerable. In fact, it’s one of the easier questions to answer. Most people agree that life is better than death. Health is better than sickness. Sustenance is better than hunger. Abundance is better than poverty. Peace is better than war. Safety is better than danger. Freedom is better than tyranny. Equal rights are better than bigotry and discrimination. Literacy is better than illiteracy. Knowledge is better than ignorance. Intelligence is better than dull-wittedness. Happiness is better than misery. Opportunities to enjoy family, friends, culture, and nature are better than drudgery and monotony. All these things can be measured. If they have increased over time, that is progress.”

Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“When I read things like, “The foundations of capitalism are shattering,” I’m like, maybe we need some time where we’re walking around with a donkey with pots clanging on the sides. . . . ’Cause now we live in an amazing world, and it’s wasted on the crappiest generation of spoiled idiots. . . . Flying is the worst one, because people come back from flights, and they tell you their story. . . . They’re like, “It was the worst day of my life. . . . We get on the plane and they made us sit there on the runway for forty minutes.” . . . Oh really, then what happened next? Did you fly through the air, incredibly, like a bird? Did you soar into the clouds, impossibly? Did you partake in the miracle of human flight, and then land softly on giant tires that you couldn’t even conceive how they put air in them? . . . You’re sitting in a chair in the sky. You’re like a Greek myth right now! . . . People say there’s delays? . . . Air travel’s too slow? New York to California in five hours. That used to take thirty years! And a bunch of you would die on the way there, and you’d get shot in the neck with an arrow, and the other passengers would just bury you and put a stick there with your hat on it and keep walking. . . . The Wright Brothers would kick us all in the [crotch] if they knew.

 

“What is progress? You might think that the question is so subjective and culturally relative as to be forever unanswerable. In fact, it’s one of the easier questions to answer. Most people agree that life is better than death. Health is better than sickness. Sustenance is better than hunger. Abundance is better than poverty. Peace is better than war. Safety is better than danger. Freedom is better than tyranny. Equal rights are better than bigotry and discrimination. Literacy is better than illiteracy. Knowledge is better than ignorance. Intelligence is better than dull-wittedness. Happiness is better than misery. Opportunities to enjoy family, friends, culture, and nature are better than drudgery and monotony. All these things can be measured. If they have increased over time, that is progress.”

Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“When I read things like, “The foundations of capitalism are shattering,” I’m like, maybe we need some time where we’re walking around with a donkey with pots clanging on the sides. . . . ’Cause now we live in an amazing world, and it’s wasted on the crappiest generation of spoiled idiots. . . . Flying is the worst one, because people come back from flights, and they tell you their story. . . . They’re like, “It was the worst day of my life. . . . We get on the plane and they made us sit there on the runway for forty minutes.” . . . Oh really, then what happened next? Did you fly through the air, incredibly, like a bird? Did you soar into the clouds, impossibly? Did you partake in the miracle of human flight, and then land softly on giant tires that you couldn’t even conceive how they put air in them? . . . You’re sitting in a chair in the sky. You’re like a Greek myth right now! . . . People say there’s delays? . . . Air travel’s too slow? New York to California in five hours. That used to take thirty years! And a bunch of you would die on the way there, and you’d get shot in the neck with an arrow, and the other passengers would just bury you and put a stick there with your hat on it and keep walking. . . . The Wright Brothers would kick us all in the [crotch] if they knew.